Keith — They didn’t actually shoot the dog on-camera. They show the guy in uniform pointing the gun as though he’s just done the deed (aiming directly at the camera, I might add), and then they show the dog lying in a sad little heap. We then get to watch as they scoop up the body and put it in a truck. The animal is clearly dead.

I suppose there’s always the chance that the dog in question is a similar-looking but different dog from the one we saw playing with Ali — not that this improves things much — but there’s no way I’m going back to watch it again to find out.

“Maybe the stories my grandpa used to tell me about Turkish soldiers making necklaces out of the ears of German soldiers — living or dead — were true.”
Dog-shooting aside, your grandpa was definitely full of it. The Turks tied their foreign policy into an ungodly series of knots in an effort to stay the hell out of World War II, getting involved only in February of 1945, when the US, Great Britain, and the USSR made declaring war on Germany a condition of becoming a founding member of the United Nations. And by that time, the battle front was so far from Anatolia that no Turkish soldier ever fired a shot.

Whatever, Santo. Next you’re going to tell me he was fibbing when he talked about how, because that yardbird Truman shorted them on rations, American soldiers had to run across fields — while being shot at by Germans — and catch bugs in their mouth if they wanted to eat.